MessengerPlus Works the Night Shift at Citizens Bank
Ever since bank tellers traded in their adding machines for computer keyboards, the banking industry has relied extensively on computing to maintain its financial records, customer support services and reporting databases. In today's highly competitive financial services industry banks have replaced bankers' hours with 24-hour convenience afforded by ATMs, telephone dial-up and on-line banking services.
Underneath the veneer of all these user conveniences, the pulse of a bank is driven by its computer system. But if the computer system should experience an unmonitored palpitation during evenings or weekends, no one may know it but the bank's customers. That's what officials at The Citizens Bank of Philadelphia, Mississippi realized, and they wanted to do something about it.
The Citizens Bank, headquartered in Philadelphia, Miss., with 14 branches within a 50-mile radius, had been experiencing periodic glitches in a new application purchased to update account activity reports.
"The new program ran after-hours, downloading all of our reports to CD-ROM instead of printing them on paper in order to make them accessible to system users," explained Mitch Peden, programmer for Citizens Bank. "About every third day the program cycle would be broken sometime during the night, and we would have to take everyone off-line for several hours." Peden would report to work at 8 a.m., find the system down and it would take until afternoon to get it up and running again. This went on for about two weeks.
The Solution
Peden had read an article about MessengerPlus and convinced the bank's controller to purchase it. The new software quickly resolved the problem and continued monitoring Citizens' banking activities.
Not too long after purchasing MessengerPlus a year ago, the bank had a problem with the software running its telephone teller system. Peden instructed MessengerPlus to monitor the program and page him at different intervals as the program completed certain tasks, helping him to determine at exactly what point the program was malfunctioning. MessengerPlus worked flawlessly, pinpointing the glitch in the programming cycle.
With Citizen's software problems resolved, Peden uses MessengerPlus to page him at different intervals during the nightly cycle to keep him informed of the status of jobs executed by the bank's night operator. Peden reports the only problem he has had since installing the software was with the paging company.
"A couple of times I wouldn't get a page and I thought that the system was down and that MessengerPlus had failed. So I went into the bank and found everything running smoothly." said Peden. "When the guy from the paging company got to work the next morning, he resolved his problem and I finally received the eight pages queued up the night before."
Peden has set the MessengerPlus scheduling option to alert two other MIS co-workers of severity messages between certain hours of the day or night. The day operator receives pages during the daytime shift and the night operator receives messages during the night shift. Peden chooses to receive all messages 24-hours a day so he can monitor activities at all times.
In addition, the bank's night operator uses MessengerPlus to let him know at what points he can start an on-line cycle sort, and it pages him when the cycle has completed. When he leaves work, he's instructed to keep his pager on until he gets the last page that verifies completion of the cycle.
"We knew that if we could save the system from being down just one time, MessengerPlus would pay for itself, and it has," said Peden. "It's been a big savings for us. "
Learn more about Citizens Bank.
Learn more about MessengerPlus.
Resource Details
Type: Case Study
Product: MessengerPlus
Customer: Citizens Bank
Summary
After experiencing periodic glitches in a new application purchased to update account activity reports, Citizens Bank turned to MessengerPlus to monitor operations and pinpoint the problem.
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